Sunday, September 14, 2008

The best iDisk replacement: Dropbox!

This iDisk replacement is so good, that I use it instead of dotMac even though I pay for dotMac. The free account includes 2 GB of storage. The way it works is it creates a folder on your Mac that is synched back to the cloud and to every other Mac, Windows and Linux computers that it is installed on. You really have to give it a try to understand how great it is. You can even restore deleted files through the web interface. You just have to download the software and you can create your account through the app.

6 Comments:

To me, the HUGE advantage of Dropbox over iDisk is that you can keep a folder(s) synched and backed up without it taking up any more of your precious HD space.

With iDisk, you can keep keep a local copy of your iDisk on your machine, but it reserves the amount of the off-line space on your computer, which is a PITA if your main machine is a laptop.

With Dropbox, you can just drag the folder you want to keep backed up to the Dropbox folder and that's it. I was AMAZED at how easy it was. So far, I'm very impressed with this service. I hope they do really well.

this looks more like a way to share your files publicly than a back up system. the whole community has access to anything you put in there, for any purposes whatsoever, according to the license agreement

@the last few posters.Understandable where the misconception comes from, but Dropbox doesn't let your files become public unless you put them in the 'Public' folder. The 'We can has all' clause in the EULA is there so that DB can store/transfer/encrypt/do all that other nifty stuff it does with your files that might change in implementation at a moment's notice because the project is still in open beta. Trust me (I use it), the service is as safe as a beta could be :)

I have decided that the best replacement for iDisk is a combination of Transmit and Amazon S3. Transmit will mount the S3 bucket as a disk in the same way that iDisk is mounted and mounted that way it works just as iDisk works. Only better because it is faster.